Descend into the Loving Arms of the Night

Tender are the hunters

Tender is the night

-Jackson Browne

I have been having some wonderfully inspiring conversations over the last few days and a conversation I had last night got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects, that of descent and darkness.  The darkness is something that I have had a fear of for my whole life.  I always felt hunted in the darkness.

In my way of thinking, fears are not something to be conquered.  The language shouldn't be so aggressive.  Fears exist to illustrate something we cannot see in ourselves, which is why I believe the darkness is such a common fear and fitting symbol.  It takes a lot of bravery to look into the dark places within ourselves but these are often the most rewarding places to look.

I have worked to make an ally of the darkness and feel like I have made some progress.  In the western way of thinking, we are taught to strive for ascension.  To look outside the warm animal bodies we possess to some place in the sky where everything will be safe.  We were never meant to be safe and it is important to learn to accept this.  The only way to feel safe is to give yourself over to the wildness that is life.  If you need to feel comforted, take off your shoes, find a patch of nice unpaved ground and wiggle your toes around a bit.  Find both the physical (feet touching soil) and soulful connection to the truly bigger story that is life on Earth.  Descend into the depths and don't be afraid to look.  What you find, just may save your life.


You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The descent beckons
              as the ascent beckoned.                 
                               Memory is a kind      
of accomplishment,                          
              a sort of renewal
                               even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
              inhabited by hordes
                               heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
              since their movements
                               are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned).

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
              formerly
                               unsuspected. A
world lost,
              a world unsuspected,
                               beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness     .

With evening, love wakens
              though its shadows
                               which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
              grow sleepy now and drop away
                               from desire     .

Love without shadows stirs now
              beginning to awaken
                               as night
advances.

The descent 
              made up of despairs
                               and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
                               which is a reversal
of despair.
              For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
              what we have lost in the anticipation—
                               a descent follows,
endless and indestructible     .

William Carlos Williams 

“The human body literally is a microcosm that reflects and contains the entire macrocosm; thus if one could thoroughly explore one’s own body and psyche, this would bring the knowledge of all the phenomenal worlds”

—	Stanislav Grof

Holy Secrets

Below are two poems.  They are written by a father and son.  The first poem is by Kim Stafford, the son.  The second is by William Stafford, the father.

The Secret

After long delay, ignorant of what you guarded

when it came volcanic to your mind, there to be

hoarded smoldering until you found a way to tell it,

your secret is out—your joy too tender to entrust

to anyone, your pain too dangerous to reveal

until you do. And there it is, a birth, with blood,

to celebrate.

But then the bowl in the heart,

where such things first appear, has something

new to hide, some fingerling creature silver

in the dark, with jagged fins and tender wings

that must be held, locked up, suppressed, fed

crumbs as you fend off the world. Little one,

must you leave me now?

Thus we breathe our holy secrets one by one.

 

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by--
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"--
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king."

The Good Deeds of the Moon

The Good Deeds of the Moon

The moon, who is whimsicality itself, gazed into the window while you were sleeping in your cradle, and said to herself: “This child is my favorite.”

And she descended with velvet steps down her staircase of cloud, and making no sound slipped through the windowpanes. Then she threw herself over your body with the downy endearments of a mother, and she pressed her colors on your face. Ever after you’ve had green pupils, and remarkably pale cheeks. It was while brooding on your visitor that your eyes grew so astonishingly large; and she folded her arms so firmly and tenderly around your neck that you have ever since the desire to weep.

Meanwhile, as her delight grew, the Moon charged the whole room with a kind of phosphorescence or light-filled poison; and this fully alive light began to think and said, “You will be forever under the influence of my kiss. Your beauty will be my sort of beauty. You will love what I love, and love who loves me: the water and the clouds, also silence and the night; the endless and green ocean; waters chaotic and elegant, the place where you are not, the beloved whom you do not know; the grotesque blossoms; perfumes that make you rave, and cats that drape themselves on pianos and who groan like a woman, with the voice husky and delicious.

“And you will be adored by those who adore me, and flattered by those who fawn on me. You will be queen of all green-eyed men whose neck I have firmly enfolded in my nighttime attentions; of those who love the ocean, the immense green troubled and tumbling ocean, the chaotic rivers and the elegant rivers, the place where you are not, the woman whom you have never met, the ominous flowers that resemble encensoirs from some unknown religion, the perfumes that disturb the will, and those savage and sensuous animals that are the symbols of such madness.”

That is the reason, my dear spoiled and miserable boy, that I stay here, watching at your feet, trying to glimpse anywhere in your being the reflected light from that terrible Goddess, from that godmother san merci, the wetnurse who gives her poisoned breasts to the moon-maddened men.

Charles Baudelaire
Translated by R.B.

Two By John Haines

                                    










 illustration by Jack Unruh


The Ghost Hunter

Far back, in the time of ice
and empty bellies, I and three others
came over the tundra at evening,
driving before us a frightened deer.

We lighted small fires on the hillsides;
and heaped up boulders
at the gates of the valley.

We called to each other over tossing
antlers, beat legbones together,
and shook out bundles of hoofs...

There was a soft thunder in the moss
as the firelit meadow of bodies
broke past to the corral of the dead.

Now the long blade of the autumn wind
sweeps the willows and bearberries,
yellow and red in the evening light.

I hear nothing but the dinosaur tread
of winter, huge wingbeats in the stone.

I have come to this trampled ground,
to stand all night in the wind
with a hollow bone in my hand.

Legend

I.

I understand the story of Gilgamesh,
of Enkidu, who called the wind by name,
who drank at the pool of silence,
kneeling in the sunburnt shallows
with all four-footed creatures.


I know the name of that exile,
the form that it takes within us:
the parting and breaking of things,
the distance and anguish.


I know too, in its utter strangeness,
that whoever asks of the sun its rising,
of the night its moonstruck depths,
stirs the envy of God in his lofty cabin.


And when Enkidu awoke, called
from his changed, companionless sleep
—singly, in glittering pairs,
the beasts vanished from the spring.


II.

The forest bond is broken,
and the tongued leaves no longer
speak for the dumb soul lost
in the wilderness of his own flesh.


All that had life for him:
the moon with her wandering children,
the storm-horse and the shepherd-bird,
become as salt to his outspread hand.


Let him go forth, to try the roads,
become that wasted pilgrim, familiar
with dust, dry chirps and whispers;
to die many times—die as a man dies,
seeing death in the life of things.


And then descend, deep into rootland
—not as temple-gardener, planting
with laurel the graves of gods and heroes,
but as one grieving and lost …


To ask of the dead, of their fallen
web-faces, the spider’s truth,
the rove-beetle’s code of conduct.


By such knowledge is he cured,
and lives to face the sun at evening,
marked by the redness of clay,
the whiteness of ash on his body.


III.

By stealth, by the mastery of names,
and one resounding axe-blow
rung on the cedar-post at dawn,
the great, stomping bull of the forest
was slain. Rain only speaks
there now on the pelted leaves.
Overheard through the downpour,
in the stillness of my own
late-learned solace, I understand
through what repeated error
we were driven from Paradise.
The nailed gate and the fiery angel
are true.
Could we ask them,
speaking their wind-language
of cries, of indecipherable song,
it may be that the swallows
who thread the water at evening
could tell us; or that the sparrows
who flock after rain, would write
in the coarse yellow meal
we have strewn at the threshold,
why God gave death to men,
keeping life for himself.


For the strong man driven to question,
and for him who, equally strong,
believes without asking,
sleep follows like a lasting shadow.
  

Magic Words (An Inuit Poem)

In the very earliest time,
When both people and animals lived on earth,
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
And an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
And sometimes animals
And there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
Might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
And what people wanted to happen could happen
All you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.